Through the dark of the longest night,but still dwelling in darkness. I went to my woodland shrine and placed a black pebble there and then a grey pebble. When the light strengthens I'll go with a white pebble. This is a new venture for me and the shrine needs much work My new year resolution..

The Dark Moon Rite

What I said in the last post about doing a Dark Moon rite has now come to pass. At Samhain last year I had an unexpected encounter with the Dark One and so this year  I planned an extended meditation from the 1st November for thirteen days until the Dark Moon. As the Moon waned this became more intense and I've kept a daily journal which I'm going to publish extracts from here. For the first few days, up until the last quarter, this was mainly finding time for quiet meditation and planning. I also had to get on with my daily routines, but I felt myself moving inward as the last quarter passed and the Dark Moon approached.

 I planned for a final period of three days when I could be alone at home and not have to consider anything else. At midnight before the first of the three days I prepared my altar and made a dedication of the coming time for the Dark One. As I meditated I felt the familiar shiver when things start happening and knew that I was  walking the Dark Land.  Heron had left a comment last time about initiation and he had posted a writing on his blog about The Washer at the Ford. I found myself thinking about this and had visions of coming to the Ford to meet her. Crossing the Ford was my way to her.

Although I had been up late, for some reason I woke early the next morning, before dawn. From the bathroom I noticed what looked like moonlight through the frosted glass. I went to another window at the back of the house which faces east. I saw the thin crescent of the Waning Moon low in the sky and a bright planet nearby, both had just risen. When I checked later I saw that the planet had to be Venus. I didn't expect to see the Moon again until she was waxing. But the sky had cleared overnight and there she was quite bright, with Venus too. I was overwhelmed. I'd thought of retreating into darkness but here was enchanting lights in the sky and the Goddess of Love looking down on me. And so what I thought would be a dark time of retreat turned out to be an intense but quiet time when I felt blessed by a light that is the other face of darkness.

Over the three days I walked in the woods, I read about the Crone, I meditated in the dark.  I have a wide circuit that I like to walk through the woods and over a hill. I usually do this clockwise, or sunwise, but I started the three days by walking it in the opposite direction. The plan was to walk it the usual way round as a 'return' from the dark retreat. On the last night I crossed the Ford. I have my record of the crossing but that will stay in my Book of Shadows. But the thing I want to say here is that I expected to pay a price for the crossing. And I did. But the physical things that could have gone wrong were few and all happened on the return journey. When I tried to open my bedroom curtains to let the light in on the morning of the last day I couldn't. A 'dream catcher' tied to the curtain rail was tangled up with the runners and they had jammed so I had to prise one off to open the curtains. Then I did my return walk. It was raining heavily but I had committed to do it so I did. The ground was wet and slippery and I had trouble on the hill and I was wet and muddy by the time I came back though the woods. I slipped and grabbed the first thing I  could for support. It was a bramble which cut my hand.

So I did pay a price. My final planned thing was a emergence bath. With candles and lavender oil. It was so welcome when I got back cold and wet and I came out of it  re-born. Or renewed. And there is just this to write up which I am now doing.

Blessed Be

The Dark One

This last year has been a very intense one for me. An experience I had last Samhain with the Dark One was powerful and unexpected. Since then I have lived with that experience and it has deepened as I have moved closer to her. Although that's not right. I don't think you get 'close' to her in the way 'close' is usually understood. This year I am undertaking an extended meditation over the ten days from the traditional date of 'Halloween' which occurred this year just after the Full Moon, through to the Dark Moon, which I think is her time. Although I have not posted here very often of late, I'm posting  now in the midst of that extended meditation as as part of my reflection and note-taking of the process.

The ritual act that I will perform at the Dark of the Moon is gradually emerging from my  meditations and my planning. Although the ritual has been going on since the Full Moon, paradoxically growing as the Moon wanes. And paradox seems to define what is emerging. She is so close yet so 'other'. She is the mirror image of everything I hold dear, and so also its antithesis. Everything I am, she is not; she is an absence counterbalancing my presence. But also, again paradoxically, very present (?!)

Of course this extended meditation is going on alongside my everyday life: coming into focus when I have quiet times set aside for it, but also infusing all the other things I do. It's like an invisible life alongside my visible life. A secret place I can visit wherever I am and whatever else I am doing. I've never felt more like a witch.

Dark Thoughts out of Season

Time has passed and many nights of contemplation and visions in the dark.

Have I seen things I should not see?

Those spirits that I walked with through the woods walked apart, but with me:

different like the trees are different.

Now the Abyss is before me, dark and indifferent .....

These are not thoughts for Harvest, but the rain is falling and the land is sodden, and already my thoughts turn to a darker season.

Should I look more deeply into the darkness?

Winds of Change

To this lake today. The waves rushing across it make it look like the sea, though they are caused by the wind rather than tides. There is a lot of wind here. The lake is up on a plateau in the hills of North Wales. All around it is peaty soil with heather and sphagnum moss, forming tumps which, in different stages of drying out after recent warm weather, take on a beautiful succession of colours from green to yellow-green, dusky pink and rusty orange. Subdued and subtle colours  - at a distance a myriad shades of tinted straw - but close up, and interspersed with the heather, like the hues of another world.

I love to be in these empty landscapes, though ruined cottages and the remains of old lead mines show that they were not always quite so empty. There are wind turbines barely visible on the horizon, also showing that the land is being utilised in this way again. Concrete and tarmac are being laid across the peat where before there were just tracks and rubble roads. Pylons are being built to carry away the power generated.

I have mixed feelings about this. Green energy is of course a good thing, though some question how green this technology really is. And the peat too is a carbon store and this carbon is released when the peat is excavated or dries out through draining. Should I regret the loss of this wild landscape and the special things that are here? Or should I welcome the alternative ways of producing energy? If only I could be sure that it would help to avoid climate change my regret would at least be tinged with hope. But the more I find out about the technology and the impact of putting it in such places, the less I am sure.

Wordless by a Well

I've been away for  a walking holiday in the Wye Valley, exploring the river and the woodlands along it.  One place I went was a village with a old well next to the church. I thought as it was in a guide book it might be crowded but there were only  few people when I arrived and they soon went. So I was alone for a bit at the well, a really atmospheric place which I tried writing about afterwards but it seemed to be beyond words.

So, back home, I've tried to recapture the experience by meditation and automatic writing which has worked for me before.

Here's the (edited) result:

The well wet all around with iron or something from the water staining all the stone work around it. Mosses and liverworts growing up the well walls. A scent of the deep earth from the well shaft and a sudden upwelling feeling of water rising from the depths of the deep earth and from depths within me. I am well water. I am a stream.  I flow. Visions come of flowing streams a figure standing on a bridge: a priestess? a water nymph? a goddess? she stands on the bridge with the water flowing beneath her. I am her, and yet I'm watching her. We flow together washing the land, seeping into the land, one with earth, feeling the warm rays of the sun drawing us up into the air. Falling now as a shower of rain. Back to earth. A sprinkled blessing for all things.

The well coming back into focus. The stonework and the seeping water. The trees all around and the old church which i did not enter, too instilled with earth and water spirit visions to be diverted After a step out of time into the water world voices call me back. A family with young children are coming. I retreat through the churchyard into the trees beyond and linger along a hedgerow back to the village ....

The whole area around this well is a magical place. Part of me wants to write about it. Part of me says words are not the way to represent it. Sometimes I think that about this blog. That I shouldn't need to write it. That it is all just experience and nothing else is real, particularly not words. Though that's all I've got to communicate with. I don't know a lot of poetry (I should know more) but I often look into my by now old and battered  text book copy of the poems of Emily Dickinson which I had to read for A Level at school. It's one of the few schoolbooks I've kept. We looked at one with the words "internal difference ... where the meaning are" and she speaks of "saying it slant" which I remember we had to write about as "elliptical expression". I've gone off the subject I know, but those poems are the only ones I've read that hint at what can't be said in language. I know what she means.

The Gods of Midsummer

I went out to these pools looking for dragonflies and damselflies. There were lots of them, large reddish-brown ones gliding over the water with smaller electric-blue one on the edges. I couldn't get close enough from the path to get a decent pic of any of them, but I thought this dead tree, alive with lichens, made a good subject.  And there was so much else around these pools. Lots of unusual things like Marsh Cinquefoil and dwarf downy birches. But more than any of the individual things, the feeling of so much life all dancing to the tune of some magical impulse - the Green Man and the Green Lady dancing together through the longs days of the season of Midsummer. 
What should I call them? I've been discussing in some other forums whether we should know the names of the gods or whether they are beyond names and so we can choose whether or not to give them names as part of our communal religious life, or whether we should just experience them as what they are in themselves. I can never decide when I'm discussing what the right answer is. But when I'm out on a day like this all the questions dissolve and I just feel this being all around me.

Visions

 *

Thinking about Zero: the Fool, the Wanderer. Starting from nowhere on a voyage of discovery. Putting aside cards, books, images, and putting my mind into dream time, sliding across the edges of this world, this time, turning the deck of cards in the mind's eye, the eye that sees across the borders of the conscious world, the conscious time. Already the cards are peeling themselves off the envisioned deck, I walk the path of the Sorceror, the Shaman, the path where light is a soft glow at a narrow point before me and all around is dusky. The glow widens, another realm of misty colours opens up before me. Now I am the Visionary, the Seer, the Prophet. What do I see? The view clears to pastel green and pales further to clear light.

My dreams are laid out before me: each one from the notebook where I write them each morning, coming alive, resolved, what was puzzling and hazy coming into a different focus. I see things people, places as locations I can visit, anytime, for refuge, or for advice or just to be somewhere else for a while. That recurring place that came time and again into my dreams. Now I can find it. Now I know what and where it is. The ways are open for me. The strangeness still strange but not scary.

Unfinished business, but I can come again, knowing the way, but only when the gates are open. Until I am trusted with the key, which may be soon .....

Tarot

I've been taking some time to absorb the images of the Tarot pack. At the moment I'm using them for meditation. My spirit journeys have been getting more powerful and I'm getting better at spending time and finding my way.

But sometimes it seems necessary to have a fixed image or a point of focus to explore. This is a different sort of experience, and the results  seem to take me deeper into myself rather than out into other worlds.

Looking at different tarot packs is instructive. I'm coming to the conclusion that ony by designing my own (though I'm not a good artist) or collecting images that have the right resonances and making up cards from them, will I get a really useful pack for meditation purposes.

The images other people have put together are interesting and helpful, and I think it pays to refer to more than one pack when studying the Tarot. But for personal use, this would be confusing. So getting a pack together that is just right and works for me is going to be a long-term project.

A witch's work is a never-ending quest. So be it.

Plant Allies

I have been experimenting with using  plants as allies for meditation and visionary journeys. I’ve had some interesting  results  which I’m keeping for my  personal record. I’ll say something now about techniques and approaches, partly to get them clear for myself and partly in case anyone else wants to pick up from them and ask questions or make helpful suggestions.

 My basic approach is to identify suitable plants and find ways of relating with them. Books on plant lore and advice on gaining plant allies are available, but they only tell what worked for others. It’s useful to read as much as you can but not to take everything you read on trust. You need to find out what responses you can get yourself from different plants.  Approach plants in your garden, in the woods, in a local park, even in a weedy patch in a street corner, to find out which ones you can tune in to.

I have had best results from native plants growing wild and I have put some of the best ones in my garden in a special place with a seat nearby so I can meditate near them.  There are also places in the woods where certain plants and trees grow where I like to go and be quiet with them.

Sometimes you need to get closer using bits of crushed leaf for the feel or the scent or the moisture. This can be done indoors. You can also burn dried leaves in a thurible. I won’t go into eating plants now .  If you are using dried plants out of season it can also be useful  to have a picture to look at, preferably of the actual plant you are using when it was growing.

Last there is the question of buying essential oils and commercially available forms of plant essences. These are good for extra atmospheric background but not instead of actual plants. Essential oil in water in a burner or flower water put on the skin can be good, though you have to be careful what you are buying as sometimes what is sold is ‘chemically identitical’ fragrance rather than real extracts.

Beltane

For Beltane

The Green Man

&

The Faerie Lady

*

may you all keep good company

Blessed Be

L x

Searching for Traditional Craft

Should I only call myself  Witch if I have had a tradition passed on to me, or if I have been initiated by someone in the traditional craft?

I can't claim this. But 'Witch' is a state of being for me. It's a name that seems to have attached itself to me rather than one I have chosen. Following the path is something I know I have to do, as if I have no choice.

That's how I feel about it. It has nothing directly to do with specific rituals (though I'm not averse to learning them) or knowing any particular formulas. But although no-one has passed on any hidden secrets to me, I do have an experience of absorbing what feels like secret lore from my meditations and visionary journeys, and I have learnt something in getting advice about ways of doing this. But most of all I feel a personal and instinctive connection with things that are DEEP, something within me rather than something learnt or passed on.

For a long time 'Witch' was a title I aspired to but did not feel I could claim.  But experience and practise in communion with spirits and also learning things about herbs and  other lore has made me feel I can own the title.

But I'd love to know what any traditional practitioners out there think.

Curlew

I went out onto this wetland today. I knew I would be passing it about lunchtime as it was on my way to a place I had to go to in the afternoon. So I took a sandwich and a drink and stopped to walk out across the bog. I sat quietly to eat my lunch and then sat for a bit longer just immersing myself in the watery beauty of the place. I heard a small voice inside me then asking for a word or a whisper in reply. Was it me or some part of me, or was it something else speaking through me?  I wasn’t sure.

Then I heard the sound of the curlew, a long bubbling liquid sound that starts slowly and then falls over itself like a swift-running stream. These birds are now rare. Although I didn’t see it I was lucky to hear the unmistakable call. Was it the response the voice asked for?  I ’m not sure. But it was enough. The wetland had spoken to me and I walked back across the boardwalk over the bog with the silvery sound in my heart.

Belonging

Wood Sorrel and Celandines in the lane today

A warm spring day with wood sorrel and celandines all along the banks. Yesterday evening I went out into the garden and sat on the little rickety bench until it was dark. I was looking towards the west and when it got dark I saw the slim crescent of the Moon setting and in a line above were the planets Jupiter and Venus, with Venus really bright and quite high in the sky.

It was magical. Then I had a sudden very strong feeling of belonging. Like I’d just found my place in the Universe. I was overwhelmed. Everything seemed so still and close like it was holding me, keeping me where I should be in relation to everything else. I’ve had feelings like this before, but this was so intense, yet also so peaceful and calming, so I felt that everything is in its right place and I was … I’m searching for the right word here, ‘serene’, ‘calm’, ‘blissful’, ‘contained’ are all words that get near it, but not quite there.

For me, being on this earth at this time, and living simply as I do, is just right. I know it’s not the same for everyone, and hasn’t been for me at times, but if I can just hold onto this, whether I’m ‘happy’ or ‘unhappy’ at any time won’t matter. Because I’m contained within this feeling of belonging.

God of the Mist

There have been so many misty days lately, so many times when all the woods and hillsides are covered in white haze like clouds. And so the God of the Mist has made himself a presence in the valley where there is always a bit of mist along the river early in the morning.

I went there and he surprised me – whispered to me – not in words but with wispy misty thoughts giving me a shiver. Now I know him. He has touched me. Should I call him by a name? I don’t know. No name I can think of suits him. I don’t think he answers to words at all. Just shivers and shudders and dampness on the skin. He just drifts, yet he feels like a shape rather than shapeless. But dense, something that’s not seethrough but opaque. Like he doesn’t want an identity. Just to drift and be a veil over other things making them mysterious and shapeless like him.

A Cloudy Day

Yesterday I never saw the Sun behind the clouds. They were so low that everything was misty. I went out for a walk. Nothing special, just across a few fields and along a few quiet lanes. It was like walking in a dream. Not like the dream walking I’ve been practising a lot lately, though I think that helps me see things even when I’m not doing it. This was a walk through mud, over rusty gates and through a couple of messy farmyards. There was one place on a wooden footbridge over a rushing river that had a ‘picture postcard’ view with snowdrops on the banks. But mostly it was a grey day with no leaves on the trees, few flowers in bloom and the long views across the hills lost in cloud. But I felt so close to everything. When someone got off a noisy tractor and exchanged a few words it was like we were exchanging tokens of a secret pact, though I only know him slightly and I’m sure he was just being polite. How magical the ordinary, even drab world at the end of winter, can be. So real and at the same time so like a dream.

Paths in the Witchwood

I've been wandering, lost, on the fey paths, led astray by my own desire to find the darkest part of the dark wood. To discover a faun to walk or dance with me.

But here I am back in my glade again, looking for some sign of another on the path. There are some that I come across in posts about the misty places, the magic gateways and the groves of the enchanted forest.

Perhaps we will meet on one of the winding paths of the Witchwood. If so, take my hand and let us walk together.

Jack Frost

The cold weather seems to have the effect of turning me in on myself. I noticed it last year, which was the longest spell of really cold weather I remember. But this year it's different. I now have a better way of turning to my inner world.Trying to get warm in a chilly cottage by a small fire can be bleak. But my way now is to dream the weather.To become the cold world.

Last night I was out under the stars, wrapped up in warm clothes but still feeling the chilly air in my bones.Jack Frost came to me and I took his hand. We walked together in his icy world. I know this is perilous. When I came back inside I was chilled to numbness. Ice crystal images followed me to bed, even though I was cuddled up with a hot water bottle.

Jack followed me in my dreams. Next morning it took a while to adjust to the day as it slowly got light.But all this is OK. I don't feel lost and isolated by things like this any more. I feel in contact with the elements in a positive way and walking a path I want to follow, not lost in a dark place.

A Journey

I’m inspired by the journey into the Otherworld described by Heron in his Fern Law of Faery blog and encouraged by his comment on here and replies to me on his blog to try a focussed meditation for myself. So I went to the woods today.

It was in two stages. First I walked up along a path that zig-zags across the slope through the trees to a seat with a view along the valley. I sat here and prepared myself. I imagined myself entering the Otherworld and thought of the paths through the trees as spirit paths. When I had tuned into this I left the seat and continued up the slope to a higher seat under some trees which has a view across to the hills on the other side of the valley.

Now I was walking along the narrow path like it was a winding tunnel into the hill. The path was my gateway into the Otherworld. When I got to the higher seat I was ready to sit down and ‘journey’ properly, though I already thought I was half out of this world before getting there.

I wrote up my journey in my ‘Mystic Book’ and I don’t want to record all the details again here but I do want to record that I used the technique mentioned by Heron of looking out for something familiar to find a helper. I’m really pleased with this but I do need to keep it private at least for now.

It’s like there are some bits of the map in place. They could change, but even so I now have something to look for, or is it a key? Neither and both. But I’ve released the lock and taken a step on the path.

Enchanted Woods

I found this cave today, in a narrow valley. I’ve walked here lots of times before, but I  never found the path down the steep slope to this place. It’s too dark to see in very far. All around is earth and trees so this bit of rock sticking out, though covered in moss, looks strange and mysterious as if it doesn’t belong. Although I’m always walking around these woods, I often seem to find things I didn’t know were there. And sometimes I never find them again. No wonder I think the woods are enchanted.